Reviews Fanfic / Embers Vathara

Take It With a Grain of Salt

As polarizing a fic as Embers is, I'm going to try to give it a fair review.

The good points:

• The author has a very good mastery of English overall, and from a purely technical standpoint the prose is well-written and easy to read.
• The world-building was well-done, especially what with filling in the gaps in the history of the Four Nations and the Dai Li in particular.
• The OC's were likeable, well-developed, and felt like real people—Shirong and Amaya were personal favorites.

YMMV on:

• The plot points of the story can often be rather unclear. Often one of the characters will have an epiphany or reveal a plot point that isn't clear at all to the reader, and that sometimes makes it hard to understand what's going on.
• The treatment of the canon characters. Whatever the author may claim, the further the story goes the more it veers away from Zuko being an Unreliable Narrator, instead pushing him toward a Canon Sue who's never allowed to be wrong. Aang and Katara are Flanderized to truly ridiculous levels. Aang, who was canonically an occasionally flighty Reluctant Hero, is portrayed as having the emotional maturity of a four-year-old, incapable of understanding other cultures or thinking about anything more than two feet from his nose. Canonically, Katara was willing to give Zuko a second chance before he betrayed her, was angry and hurt over her mother's death and occasionally took it out on Zuko, but wanted revenge specifically on the man who did it. Here, she sees everyone of Fire Nation heritage as a monster, is willing to hurt and manipulate her own family and friends to get back at Zuko even though he didn't betray her in this timeline, and is incapable of seeing the truth even when it's slapped repeatedly in her face by people whose word she should trust. And the less said about the treatment of Avatar Kyoshi, the better.

I want to like this story, I really do. But these are not the characters I came to know and love.